March 18, 2009

(Dedicated to friend from beyond the plateaus, Niha Masih for all her yeye-ness and random inspiration to write this)

They say that it takes all kinds of people to make the world; and god tilted the favour in terms of the jerks! And yet on an average day, despite meeting three assholes, two absolute morons, one absurdly dumb fellow and half a saint, we still feel blah.

I guess blah is the new dictator of the world. It seems everywhere; most of us young ones think being ‘blah’ is what life is all about. In fact, a conversation with a dear friend today brought about how blah we both were and how he was sinking in the blahness of life and how I’m turning out to be a blah kid.

When you actually sit down to think, on one such blah day, as to what life is and other existential questions, we find that, we really have no clue about what we are doing. Although technically we are all supposed to be beings with that extra sense of whatever (now that is another issue we need to discuss), sometimes over analysis becomes the bane of existence.

There are so many days when you just, without any purpose or point, loiter online and wait for someone to ping you; many many times when we just hope desperately someone will message or call, and there are also sometimes when spam mails of US lotteries actually lift our spirits ‘cos it is ‘one new mail’ after all!!!

So while that proves that life is indeed blah and that it cannot be lifted up, what exactly makes us plod through one more day?

Our daily dose of happiness…

And surprisingly in the modern world, the daily dose of happiness doesn’t come with angel wings and bright blue eyes.

It comes in the form of bitching together, feeling good that half the world is going through the same crap like us. To some it up- to want to know that we are not alone!

Feel-good books and saccharine-sweet stuff are all nice on the ears till you are 20. But miraculously at that age, wonder what seizes the human mind and soul, that it cannot anymore be satisfied with plain simple happiness.

Happiness suddenly becomes this multiple dimensioned entity that needs some weird chemical formula that we so conveniently forget. Either the ingredient paper is lost, or the measuring glass is broken or well, the titration JUST does not read right.

All our lives we keep hunting for this lost formula paper. And when we don’t get it, we call it BlaH- which in itself, with minor changes of case, looks like a chemical formula!

Sadly, since the entire world is hunting around for their formula sheets, we barely pause to give back the papers we found, with other people’s names in it. Yes, Ms.Li’s paper is here, but well, why do I need to find Ms.Li to give it to her? Isn’t that her whole purpose in life- we think!

And thinking thus, we walk off, tossing Ms.Li’s paper in the wind.

And someone, maybe Ms.Li, just did that with yours!

It is really a strange strange world. We get lazier, crazier and meaner by the day. And in a way we can’t influence the good deeds, we influence the entire world around us to get lazier, crazier and meaner by the day!

We get dysfunctional. We do things for the heck of it. We have absolutely no aim/ambition/goal. We just call something destination, as your college teachers ask you to state one, those annoying aunties you meet in marriages want to know or just simply because you don’t want to be the only one with no answer.

We just live the day. If we can’t- we sleep it away. We try to kill time talking on the phone. When we lose topics of conversation, we pull in a third person into it and thrash them to bits: and bingo, we created gossip.

To keep this gossip going, we made newspapers and television and now- the internet. And since all these developed, the world shrank. And instead of your neighbour’s cat and your dog upsetting your day with their fights, it is possible to hear a friend in Swaziland’s cat meowing in an annoying fashion through things like video conferencing. Wonder why we go to this extent just to spoil our moods!

We try so hard to do things. Think for instance- to impress someone. In the first place, the person we are trying to impress is yet another dysfunctional clueless entity. Why we impress, in the second place, has no valid reason backing it. And thirdly, this whole process is so based on luck, chance and those permutations and combinations that we took lightly in our twelfth class mathematics. SO much so that, no matter what you do, the numbers decide your win/loss.

There is never a rule, really. You just do things. Today, things may happen. Tomorrow, to use as clichéd an expression as shit happens, the coin may flip against you! And you’ll have a lousy day. And you’ll call up every single person on your calling list and talk vaguely about random stuff.

Talking of random, have you noticed how we all actually use such irrelevant language, leave alone irreverent too! Why should everything be random? Random is the aide of Blah, the dictator-in-the-making, with such a transmogrifying form that fits snugly into any situation. And don’t even get me started on the four letter F word that we so abuse! Everything, everybody- in adjective, noun, verb, why even pronouns and conjunctions, use this saviour-word. Our vocabulary is absolutely…well, I’ll stop.

Like I mentioned, this started from a random inspiration over IM-ing on gtalk one very dull night, when I was listlessly looking at the computer, studying a bit, chatting a bit, this friend’s pretty depressed status message prompts me to buzz her. And as randomly as it started, I began to type this out; just ’cos she mentioned that I should try to write a book.

I believe most accidents and discoveries occur that way- randomly. Life and everything about it is so random, that it is difficult for the human mind to grapple with it without having to bring in an external factor called god into the picture.

This God is readymade bait for everything- from why the shirt got singed to why it rained- he/she takes all the blame we can’t handle ourselves. And when un-forecasted events occur, it is God’s doing. Things go right-we call it mercy, and things go wrong- we call it punishment. And in this way, we teach ourselves to accept graciously everything bestowed on us.

Life’s philosophy clearly shows that more important than whether or not God exists is the question of whether or not we can exist without this concept called God. We need this entity to bring about a kind of sense into our existences. To make us believe that we have a control over events and we so know what we are doing.

This attitude, however, only sets in after heavy responsibility is dropped on an individual’s shoulders. Till then, you have ample time to question, prod, conclude. But once responsibility becomes a way of life- through work, marriage, etc-one needs this person/energy called God to tell us not to be afraid of this thing we got ourselves into.

But while we are still young and non-escapists, we go through blah, random and F-(grammatical usage most suitable) emotions, we discover absolute loneliness, complete fear and raw pain. Over time and God, we become numb.

This numbness, then leads to a kind of acceptance of life and situation so much so that, lethargy sets in, vices take root and life loses meaning slowly and steadily. This is the time of great contended happiness and some boring sadness. And as time goes by, one enters mid-life. And by then the numbing would have over-numbed itself and boredom would have bored itself so much that thinking peeks from below.

Once we start thinking and analyzing- life, career, relationships, etc- we find all the inconsistencies, the aggression, the energy and that itchy-I-got-do-something feel that people generally call mid-life crisis. You now want to rediscover, redo(sometimes undo) and renew your life.

We go through an interesting, daring and yet a wonderfully eventful phase. This is why aunties dress like twenty year olds and uncle strut around with a stud walk. And mostly, these are not to be laughed at, but lauded. It is these people who have discovered the joy of living once again. And in that freshness, happiness and pure elation, they go through the exploration stage once again.

Honestly, the next stage that follows is the happiest. Where the sense of the years and the rediscovery of the self sets in euphoria that is hard to quell. And as time slowly ticks and takes away your bones, skin and spirit, you age. You get back to losing all you gained as now, the body loses its strength to exert itself. And instead of letting the vicious circle run, this bodily loss of power forces man to turn back to its second childhood. And death.

Through all this twist and turns of emotion, it is pretty hard to also be nice to people. We have our own selves to figure out. Where the heck is there any time?

The only answer lies in the fact of acknowledging that we can never really figure ourselves out and to live the moment. Lest this gets any preachy-er than that, I stop. Also, I’m sleepy and my hand’s aching. And suddenly, I really don’t know what more to write. As randomly as it began, I conclude.